Diasporic Muslims read American race relations through migrant labor hierarchies

Evidence

The root cause of discrimination against African American Muslims lies largely in the legacies of slavery that produced Jim Crow segregation laws, lynchings, mass incarceration, school-to-jail pipelines, and the extreme poverty of Black innercity ghettos. In contrast, discrimination against immigrant Muslims is animated largely by Orientalism, American empire in Muslim-majority countries, xenophobia, and theologically based Islamophobia. A book about anti-Muslim racism that merges the experiences of immigrant and African American Muslims thus risks erasure of the important, nuanced distinctions between the two groups’ past and present subordination. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 117 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Muslims arrived in the United States not only by immigrating from more than one hundred different countries, many of which were targets of American imperial designs, but also on ships carrying enslaved Africans beginning in the seventeenth century. Islam’s association with categorically condemned heathens and savages from Africa merged with the importation of European Orientalism whose nemesis was the Mahometan Turk to produce a complex and fluid process of racialization. As a result, Muslim identity is socially constructed to merge immigrants and non-immigrants of various skin colors, ancestries, and phenotypes into an essentialized identity: the foreign, illiberal, and inherently violent Racial Muslim. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 481 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Racial categories are produced and applied to Muslim labor migrants. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 74; US Muslims are unusually diverse in ancestry, color, and migration pathway; American Muslim identity merges slavery-era and immigrant origins into one racialized type — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 481 (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• African American and immigrant Muslims face distinct forms of anti-Muslim racism. #complicates (0.85) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 117
• African American and immigrant Muslims face distinct, not merged, forms of discrimination #complicates (0.85)
• American Muslim identity merges slavery-era and immigrant origins into one racialized type #complicates (0.82) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 481
• African American Muslims experience racialized religion differently due to distinct history #complicates (0.80) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 478
• African American Muslims are racialized as Black before being seen as Muslim #complicates (0.78) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 116